rutted highway
the heavy trucks trundling
their burdens all day and all
night. Her body was a thing
stuffed, swollen, convulsed
empty, producing for the state
and Jesus three soldiers and one
sailor, two more breeding wombs
and a (defunct) prostitute.
The surviving corporal drives
hack, one mother waits tables;
the other typed, married into
the suburbs and is den
mother to cubscouts.
The husband, cocksman, luckless
horse and numbersplayer, security
guard and petty thief, died
at fifty-six of cancer
of the colon.
Now like an abandoned car
she has been towed here
to fall apart.
She wastes, drugged,
in a spreading pool
of urine.
Surely she could be used,
her eyes, her heart
still strangely sturdy,
her one good kidney
could be salvaged for the rich
who are too valuable at seventy-four
to throw away.
The bumpity road to mutual devotion
Do you remember the first raw winter
of our women’s group, both of us fierce as mother bears?
Every day came down like a pile driver in the morning
shaking the bed empty
stomping sleep like a run-over bag.
Our pain was new, a too sharp kitchen knife.
We bled on everything we touched.
I could hardly type for scars.
Rage sang like a coloratura doing trills
in my head as I ricocheted up male streets.
You came on like a sergeant of marines.
You were freshly ashamed of your beauty
believing if you frowned a lot no one
would notice your face.
The group defined us the strong ones
loved us, hated us, baited us, set us
one on the other. We met
almost clandestinely. You brought flowers.
We praised lesbian love intellectually, looking
hard in each other’s black eyes, and each stayed
on her side of the kitchen exuding
a nervous whine like an avalanche of white mice.
What a rutted road through thick gassy clouds of nightmare,
political bedlam. Each has let
the other down and picked her up.
We will never be lovers; too scared
of losing each other. What tantalizes past flesh
—too mirrored, lush, dark haired and soft in the belly—
is the strange mind rasping, clanging, engaging.
What we fantasize—rising like a bird kite
on the hot afternoon air—is work together.
Projects, battles, schemes, manifestoes
are born from the brushing of wills
like small sparks from loose hair,
and will we let them fade, static electricity?
What shall we do before
they crush us? How far will we travel
to no country on earth?
What houses should we build? and which tear down?
what chapels, what bridges, what power stations
and stations of that burning green energy
beyond the destruction of power?
Trust me with your hand. For us to be friends
is a mating of eagle and ostrich, from both sides.
On Castle Hill
As we wandered through the hill of graves,
men lost at sea, women in childbirth,
slabs on which were thriftily listed
nine children like drowned puppies,
all the Susan-B-wife-of-Joshua-Stones,
a woman in a long calico gown strolled toward us
bells jangling at waist, at wrists,
lank brown hair streaming.
We spoke to her but she smiled only
and drifted on into the overgrown woods.
Suppose, you said, she is a ghost.
You repeated a tale from Castanada
about journeying toward one’s childhood
never arriving but encountering
on the way many people, all dead,
journeying toward the land of heart’s desire.
I would not walk a foot into my childhood,
I said, picking blackberries for you to taste,
large, moist and sweet as your eyes.
My land of desire is the marches
of the unborn. The dead
are powerless to grant us
wishes, their struggles
are the wave that carried us here.
Our wind blows on toward those hills
we will never see.
From
Sand Roads
7. The development
The bulldozers come, they rip
a hole in the sand along
the new blacktop road with a tony name
(Trotting Park, Pamet Hills)
and up goes another glass-walled-
split-level-livingroom-vast-as-a-
roller-rink-$100,000
summer home for a psychiatrist
and family.
Nine months
the heavy trucks trundling
their burdens all day and all
night. Her body was a thing
stuffed, swollen, convulsed
empty, producing for the state
and Jesus three soldiers and one
sailor, two more breeding wombs
and a (defunct) prostitute.
The surviving corporal drives
hack, one mother waits tables;
the other typed, married into
the suburbs and is den
mother to cubscouts.
The husband, cocksman, luckless
horse and numbersplayer, security
guard and petty thief, died
at fifty-six of cancer
of the colon.
Now like an abandoned car
she has been towed here
to fall apart.
She wastes, drugged,
in a spreading pool
of urine.
Surely she could be used,
her eyes, her heart
still strangely sturdy,
her one good kidney
could be salvaged for the rich
who are too valuable at seventy-four
to throw away.
The bumpity road to mutual devotion
Do you remember the first raw winter
of our women’s group, both of us fierce as mother bears?
Every day came down like a pile driver in the morning
shaking the bed empty
stomping sleep like a run-over bag.
Our pain was new, a too sharp kitchen knife.
We bled on everything we touched.
I could hardly type for scars.
Rage sang like a coloratura doing trills
in my head as I ricocheted up male streets.
You came on like a sergeant of marines.
You were freshly ashamed of your beauty
believing if you frowned a lot no one
would notice your face.
The group defined us the strong ones
loved us, hated us, baited us, set us
one on the other. We met
almost clandestinely. You brought flowers.
We praised lesbian love intellectually, looking
hard in each other’s black eyes, and each stayed
on her side of the kitchen exuding
a nervous whine like an avalanche of white mice.
What a rutted road through thick gassy clouds of nightmare,
political bedlam. Each has let
the other down and picked her up.
We will never be lovers; too scared
of losing each other. What tantalizes past flesh
—too mirrored, lush, dark haired and soft in the belly—
is the strange mind rasping, clanging, engaging.
What we fantasize—rising like a bird kite
on the hot afternoon air—is work together.
Projects, battles, schemes, manifestoes
are born from the brushing of wills
like small sparks from loose hair,
and will we let them fade, static electricity?
What shall we do before
they crush us? How far will we travel
to no country on earth?
What houses should we build? and which tear down?
what chapels, what bridges, what power stations
and stations of that burning green energy
beyond the destruction of power?
Trust me with your hand. For us to be friends
is a mating of eagle and ostrich, from both sides.
On Castle Hill
As we wandered through the hill of graves,
men lost at sea, women in childbirth,
slabs on which were thriftily listed
nine children like drowned puppies,
all the Susan-B-wife-of-Joshua-Stones,
a woman in a long calico gown strolled toward us
bells jangling at waist, at wrists,
lank brown hair streaming.
We spoke to her but she smiled only
and drifted on into the overgrown woods.
Suppose, you said, she is a ghost.
You repeated a tale from Castanada
about journeying toward one’s childhood
never arriving but encountering
on the way many people, all dead,
journeying toward the land of heart’s desire.
I would not walk a foot into my childhood,
I said, picking blackberries for you to taste,
large, moist and sweet as your eyes.
My land of desire is the marches
of the unborn. The dead
are powerless to grant us
wishes, their struggles
are the wave that carried us here.
Our wind blows on toward those hills
we will never see.
From
Sand Roads
7. The development
The bulldozers come, they rip
a hole in the sand along
the new blacktop road with a tony name
(Trotting Park, Pamet Hills)
and up goes another glass-walled-
split-level-livingroom-vast-as-a-
roller-rink-$100,000
summer home for a psychiatrist
and family.
Nine months
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